mitted to be useful, and dropped. We shall reeur, in a subsequent part of this Paper, to the second of these proposals.

But we own that we are astonished, when we find Mr Serope citing, as an authority for his own, speculations, the Report of the Irish Commissioners of Inquiry. Of all the measures which they consider, that which they most firmly, we had almost said most fiercely, reject, is Mr Serope's nostrum,-a right to relief in the able-bodied!

They do not palliate the general destitution of the labouring classes. Their description of it certainly now applies only partially, to the North and to the East of Ireland; and we hope does not apply generally, even to the South and the West.

"It is impossible,' (they say,) for the able-bodied, in general, to provide against sickness or the temporary absence of employment, or against old age or the destitution of their widows and children in the contingent event of their own premature decease.

A great portion of them are insufficiently provided at any time with the commonest necessaries of life. Their habitations are wretched hovels, several of a family sleep together upon straw or upon the bare ground, sometimes with a blanket, sometimes even without so much to cover them; their food commonly consists of dry potatoes, and with these they are at times so scantily supplied as to be obliged to stint themselves to one spare meal in the day. There are even instances of persons being driven by hunger to seek sustenance in wild herbs. They sometimes get a herring, or a little milk, but they never get meat, except at Christmas, Easter, and Shrovetide.

Some go in search of employment to Great Britain during the harvest, others wander through Ireland with the same view.

The wives and children of many are occasionally obliged to beg; they do so reluctantly, and with shame, and in general go to a distance from home that they may not be known.

Mendicancy, too, is the sole resource of the aged and impotent of the poorer classes in general, when children or relatives are unable to support them. To it, therefore, crowds are driven for the means of existence, and the knowledge that such is the fact leads to an indiscriminate giving of alms, which encourages idleness, imposture, and general crime.'

With these facts before us,' the Commissioners add, "we cannot hesitate to state that remedial measures are necessary. It has been suggested to us to recommend a poor-law for Ireland 'similar to that of England, which requires that work and sup'port shall be found for all able-bodied persons who may from time to time be out of employment.' They first consider the plan of giving such work and support in workhouses, and decide, that if all who require relief were to be so relieved, it would be morally, indeed physically impossible, to provide for such a

multitude, or even to attempt it with safety; but that as the ' able-bodied in general and their families would endure any 'misery rather than make a workhouse their domicile, the system would prove illusory, and after much trouble, expense, ' and mischief, would necessarily be abandoned altogether.'

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'It may be considered, however,' (they continue,) that the objections applicable to a provision for enforcing in-door work would not be applicable to one for enforcing out-door employment; but, considering the number of persons for whom work must be found, and the experience had in England of the consequences to which any plan of out-door compulsory employment inevitably leads, it appears to us that any attempt to introduce it into Ireland must lead to the most pernicious results.

If the farmers were compelled to take more men than they choose or thought they wanted, they would of course reduce the wages of all to a minimum. If, on the other hand, magistrates or other local authorities were empowered to frame a scale of wages or allowances so as to secure to each labourer a certain sum by the week, we do not think they could, with safety to their persons and property, fix a less sum than would be equal to the highest rate of wages pre-existing in the district for which they were required to act; nor would any thing less enable the labourer to support himself and his family upon such food, with such clothing, and in such dwellings, as any person undertaking to provide permanently for human beings in a civilized country could say they ought to be satisfied with. It would therefore, we think, be necessary to fix different scales of wages or allowances, which would average for the whole of Ireland about 4s. 6d. a-week. This would be to double the present earnings of the body of labourers, and these amount to about L.6,800,000 a-year. The additional charge for labour would, therefore, come to about that sum.

'It could not be expected that the tenantry should bear this burthen; they have not capital to do so, even if the further sum they were required to expend on labour were likely to make a profitable return; but we are persuaded that it could do no such thing. If the law required that the whole number of agricultural labourers in Ireland should be set to work, there must be constantly employed in Ireland about five labourers for every two employed on the same extent of cultivated land in Great Britain; the labourers, too, would not be freely taken by their employers and bound to please them or lose their employment, but would be forced upon them, and entitled to be paid a certain sum whether they gave satisfaction or not; under such circumstances, labour could not be expected to yield a profitable return to those who paid for it.

The charge must, therefore, come upon the landlords.

Now, the Rental of the country at present goes to feed commerce; to give employment directly or indirectly to profitable labourers; and to keep society in a healthy state. If any considerable portion of it were devoted to the support of unprofitable labourers, it would be in a great degree consumed without being reproduced; commerce must decay, and

the demand for agricultural produce and all commodities (save potatoes and coarse clothing) must immediately contract; rents must therefore diminish, while the number of persons out of employment and in need of support must increase, and general ruin be the result.'

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They then cite, from the English Poor Inquiry Report, the history, as we have already given it, of Cholesbury,-adding this memorable comment: As the parish of Cholesbury became to ' other parishes in England, so, we are persuaded, would very 'many of the parishes of Ireland be to the residue at the end of 'a year, from the commencement of any system for charging 'the land indefinitely, with the support of the whole labouring part of the community; and, as these parishes must shortly 'bring down all others to their level, the whole of Ireland would shortly have to lean on Great Britain for support. It may, 'however, be said that England, with the poor-law system we condemn, has become a great and flourishing country; while Ireland, without it, is in a state of semi-barbarism. The fact is undoubtedly so. But because extraordinary strength has 'withstood poison, it does not follow that poison should be prescribed as a remedy for weakness. The true cause of the greatness of England is to be found in her free constitution. Unfortunately, it is only of late years, and by slow degrees, that it has been allowed to diffuse itself through the mass of 'the people of Ireland. For nearly the whole of the last century, they were governed by a Code, the policy of which was to keep them in poverty and ignorance, and which was perfect for its purpose. Although it is now no more, it has left behind 'it habits and dispositions which are opposed to improvement; ' and we should consider ourselves accessories to a continuance ' of them, if we attempted to guarantee to the labourer pauper support, instead of endeavouring to render him independent of

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it.'

We may well say, that we are wholly unable to understand how Mr Scrope, holding opinions irreconcilably opposed to those of the Commissioners, should regret that their recommendations have been disregarded.

He endeavours to support his scheme by three other authorities-the English Commissioners of Inquiry, the author of the Preface to the Foreign communications on Paor-Laws, and Dr Doyle.

'I will not go,' (he says,) into lengthened proofs of the success that has attended the long-tried experiment of the Elizabethan poor-law in England, which Mr John O'Connell, with a very pardonable ignorance of the subject, seems to question. I will content myself with quoting the well-considered deliberate opinion of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the working of the English poor-law, expressed in their report to

Parliament, after three years occupied in a close and rigid examination of the system, and particularly into all its abuses-the opinion, be it remembered, of able men, several of whom, it is well known, entered upon the inquiry with most unpromising prejudices against the principle of any poor-law, and still more against the principle of compulsory relief, and, above all, to the able-bodied. Yet what do they emphatically declare in their final Report, as the conclusion they have arrived at ?'

Mr Scrope then quotes the following passage from the Report of the English Commissioners:

If we believed the evils stated in the previous part of the report, cr evils resembling or even approaching them, to be necessarily incidental to the compulsory relief of the able-bodied, we should not hesitate in recommending its entire abolition. But we do not believe these evils to be its necessary consequences. We believe that, under strict regulations, adequately enforced, such relief may be afforded safely and even beneficially.

In all extensive communities, circumstances will occur in which an individual, by the failure of his means of subsistence, will be exposed to the danger of perishing. To refuse relief, and at the same time to punish mendicity, when it cannot be proved that the offender could have obtained subsistence by labour, is repugnant to the common sentiments of mankind; it is repugnant to them to punish even depredation, apparently committed as the only resource against want.

From the evidence collected under this commission, we are induced to believe that a compulsory provision for the relief of the indigent can be generally administered on a sound and well-defined principle; and that, under the operation of this principle, the assurance that no one need perish from want may be rendered more complete than at present, and the mendicant and vagrant repressed by disarming them of their weapon-the plea of impending starvation."

But what is this sound and well-defined principle?' It is this:—That a marked line be drawn between the pauper and the independent labourer. We do not believe,' they observe, that a country in which this line has been effaced, can retain its prosperity, or even its civilisation.' Further, that the situation of the person receiving, assistance, shall not be made really or apparently so eligible as that of the independent labourer Every penny,' they add, that tends to render 'the situation of the pauper more eligible than that of the inde'pendent labourer, is a bounty on indolence and vice.' Moreover, as the mode by which this principle is to be enforced, -their first recommendation, the keystone of their whole plan, is that, except as to medical attendance, and subject to an exception respecting apprenticeship, all relief whatever to able-bodied persons, or to their families, otherwise than in * well-regulated workhouses, (i. e. places where they may be set to work according to the spirit, aud intention, of the 43d

of Elizabeth,) shall be declared unlawful, and shall cease.' They say, that out-door relief contains in itself the elements of an extension, which may ultimately absorb the whole fund ' out of which it arises. On the results of such an absorption they do not dwell; feeling probably that it requires no illustration. But they explain at some length a less obvious part of the subject-its effect on the labouring class, for whose benefit it is supposed to be extended.

Under its influence,' (they say,) piece-work is refused to the single man, or to the married man if he have any property, because they can exist on day wages; it is refused to the active and intelligent labourer, because he would earn too much. The enterprising man, who has fled from the tyranny and pauperism of his parish to some place where there is a demand and a reward for his services, is driven from a situation which suits him, and an employer to whom he is attached, and forced to receive as alms a portion only of what he was obtaining by his own exertions. He is driven from a place where he was earning, as a free labourer, 12s. or 14s. a-week, and is offered road-work, as a pauper, at sixpence a day, or perhaps to be put up by the parish authorities to auction, and sold to the farmer who will take him at the lowest allowance.

"Can we wonder if the labourer abandons virtues of which this is the reward? If he gives up the economy in return for which he has been proscribed, the diligence for which he has been condemned to involuntary idleness, and the prudence, if it can be called such, which diminishes his means just as much as it diminishes his wants? Can we wonder if, smarting under these oppressions, he considers the law, and all who administer the law, as his enemies, the fair objects of his fraud or his violence? Can we wonder if, to increase his income, and to revenge himself on the parish, he marries, and thus helps to increase that local over-population, which is gradually eating away the fund out of which he and all the other labourers of the parish are to be maintained?'

But this is not the worst.

Though the injustice,' (they add,) perpetrated on the man who struggles, as far as he can struggle, against the oppression of the system, who refuses, as far as he can refuse, to be its accomplice, is at first sight the most revolting, the severest sufferers are those that have become callous to their own degradation, who value parish support as their privilege, and demand it as their right; and complain only that it is limited in amount, or that some sort of labour or confinement is exacted in return. No man's principles can be corrupted without injury to so ciety in general; but the person most injured is the person whose principles have been corrupted. The constant war which the pauper has to wage with all who employ or pay him, is destructive to his honesty and his temper; as his subsistence does not depend on his exertions, he loses all that sweetens labour, its association with reward, and gets